Teen & Grow Rich

The audit

The Napoleon Hill audit

This book remaps Napoleon Hill's ideas. It does not inherit his authority. Here is the difference, with dates.

Hill's principles are worth testing. His biography is not. Historians and journalists who went looking for the meetings, the interviews and the credentials behind Think and Grow Rich did not find them — and they did find fraud charges. This page says so plainly, because a book that promises no fake case studies cannot quietly stand on some.

What the record shows

c. 1908

The commission. Hill said Andrew Carnegie handed him the assignment that became his life's work: interview the men who had built America's fortunes and reduce what they did to a set of principles. David Nasaw, who wrote the standard biography of Carnegie and worked through his papers, found no evidence that Hill and Carnegie ever met.

The same years

While he places the Carnegie commission, Hill was on the run over a lumber fraud in Alabama.

April 1912

The trade magazine Motor World described Hill's Automobile College of Washington as a scam.

June 1918

Illinois issued warrants for Hill under the state's blue-sky securities laws.

1919

The Federal Trade Commission brought charges against him.

Throughout

The interviews themselves. Beyond one brief encounter with Thomas Edison, there are no records of Hill interviewing the famous men whose lessons he reported.

Sources

Checked on 30 July 2026.

Then why is the book built on him?

Because the principles and the man are two different things. Desire, decision, planning, persistence, a small honest team, paying attention to where your attention goes — none of that is exotic, and all of it can be tested by one person in ninety days. That part survives the audit intact. You do not have to trust Hill to run it. You run it and look at what exists afterwards.

What does not survive is Hill's method of proof: unverifiable stories about famous men, told as evidence. So this book does the opposite, and says so on printed page 2 rather than in a footnote:

The stories in this edition are fictional composites. They are designed to make the principles easy to understand; they are not presented as verified case studies. Examples of income, audience growth, or opportunity are not promises or typical results.

Teen & Grow Rich, Publishing Note, printed page 2

That is the whole trade. The stories in the book are labelled as invented, so nothing rests on them. The claims that are meant to be believed — the record on the proof page, every number anywhere on this site — carry a source, or they are not here.

Statistics you will not find on this site

These two are quoted constantly in books like this one. Both are unsourced. They are named here so that their absence reads as a decision rather than an oversight.

The 1953 Yale goal-setting study

“Three per cent of Yale's class of 1953 wrote their goals down, and twenty years later that three per cent was worth more than the other ninety-seven per cent combined.”

Yale has no record of such a study. A 1996 Fast Company investigation went looking for it and could not find anyone able to produce it, at Yale or anywhere else. It survives because it is useful, not because it happened.

The 65% / 95% accountability figures

“You are 65% more likely to reach a goal if you tell someone, and 95% more likely if you book a regular check-in with them.”

Usually credited to a training-industry body. No study, no sample size and no method has ever been produced. The underlying idea — a witness helps — is in this book as Chapter 1's fourth Play step, stated without a fake number attached.

The rule that follows: every number on this site links to a primary source, or it gets cut. If you find one that does not, the mailbox at the bottom of this page is the route — it is read by an adult, and a correction is a favour.